Objecting to Objectification: Women’s Collective Action against Sexual Objectification on Television

Media often portray women as mere sexual objects, but to date no known research has explored relations between exposure to such media content and willingness to engage in collective action. In the present study, Italian participants (78 men; 81 women) were exposed to a nature TV documentary (Control video), a television clip portraying women as sexual objects (SO video), or to the same sexually objectifying television clip including a commentary against such degrading depiction of women (Critique SO video). After exposure to the Critique SO video, women, but not men, reported greater collective action proclivity and behavioral intention to support a protest against female sexual objectification, as compared to the Control condition. Importantly, results further demonstrated that anger was the mechanism underlying women’s collective action proclivity, as well as intention to react. These findings suggest that media literacy messages in the form of critique videos may be valuable tools to promote more active and critical media consumption and that media specialists, concerned citizens, and social media activists may use such messages to motivate women to collectively take action against sexual objectification.     

Measuring Probabilistic Reasoning: The Construction of a New Scale Applying Item Response Theory

Probabilistic reasoning skills are important in various contexts. The aim of the present study was to develop a new instrument (the Probabilistic Reasoning Scale – PRS) to accurately measure low levels of probabilistic reasoning ability in order to identify people with difficulties in this domain. Item response theory was applied to construct the scale, and to investigate differential item functioning (i.e., whether the items were invariant) across genders, educational levels, and languages. Additionally, we tested the validity of the scale by investigating the relationships between the PRS and several other measures. The results revealed that the items had a low level of difficulty. Nonetheless, the discriminative measures showed that the items can discriminate between individuals with different trait levels, and the test information function showed that the scale accurately assesses low levels of probabilistic reasoning ability. Additionally, through investigating differential item functioning, the measurement equivalence of the scale at the item level was confirmed for gender, educational status, and language (i.e., Italian and English). Concerning validity, the results showed the expected correlations with numerical skills, math‐related attitudes, statistics achievement, IQ, reasoning skills, and risky choices both in the Italian and British samples. In conclusion, the PRS is an ideal instrument for identifying individuals who struggle with basic probabilistic reasoning, and who could be targeted by specific interventions. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Irrational and Metacognitive Beliefs Mediate the Relationship Between Content Beliefs and GAD Symptoms: A Study on a Normal Population

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and Metacognitive Therapy (MCT) models show both similarities and differences in conceptualizing anxiety. This work assumes that REBT’s irrational and MCT’s metacognitive beliefs play a mediation role while CBT’s disorder specific content beliefs act as triggers. This hypothesis is tested using a regression model in which metacognitive and irrational beliefs play a mediation role while content disorder beliefs are independent variables. This paper applied this model to generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), a psychiatric diagnosis in which anxiety is the major feature. In GAD, the specific content beliefs are negative problem orientation and intolerance of uncertainty. Therefore, 149 non clinical subjects completed 4 self-report questionnaires: the Negative Orientation to the Problems Questionnaire and the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale as measures for content cognitive beliefs, the Attitudes and Beliefs Scale for irrational beliefs, and the Metacognitive Questionnaire 30 Items Version for metacognitive beliefs. The generalized anxiety disorder questionnaire was chosen in order to measure anxiety as dependent variable. Regression analyses confirmed that irrational and metacognitive beliefs mediate the relation between cognitive content beliefs and GAD. We clinically interpret mediation as a second level regulation.     

Visual cues of motion that trigger animacy perception at birth: the case of self‐propulsion

Self‐propelled motion is a powerful cue that conveys information that an object is animate. In this case, animate refers to an entity's capacity to initiate motion without an applied external force. Sensitivity to this motion cue is present in infants that are a few months old, but whether this sensitivity is experience‐dependent or is already present at birth is unknown. Here, we tested newborns to examine whether predispositions to process self‐produced motion cues underlying animacy perception were present soon after birth. We systematically manipulated the onset of motion by self‐propulsion (Experiment 1) and the change in trajectory direction in the presence or absence of direct contact with an external object (Experiments 2 and 3) to investigate how these motion cues determine preference in newborns. Overall, data demonstrated that, at least at birth, the self‐propelled onset of motion is a crucial visual cue that allowed newborns to differentiate between self‐ and non‐self‐propelled objects (Experiment 1) because when this cue was removed, newborns did not manifest any visual preference (Experiment 2), even if they were able to discriminate between the stimuli (Experiment 3). To our knowledge, this is the first study aimed at identifying sensitivity in human newborns to the most basic and rudimentary motion cues that reliably trigger perceptions of animacy in adults. Our findings are compatible with the hypothesis of the existence of inborn predispositions to visual cues of motion that trigger animacy perception in adults.     

Sacrifice in close relationships: Motives,emotions, and relationship outcomes

Romantic partners often face situations in which their preferences, interests and goals are not well aligned—what is good for one partner is not good for the other. In these situations, people need to make a decision between pursuing their own self‐interest and sacrificing for their partner or the relationship. In this work, we discuss antecedents and consequences of sacrifice in close relationships. Specifically, we address when people are more likely to sacrifice, what are the motivations driving a sacrifice, and what are the affective consequences of this behavior for the person who makes the sacrifice (i.e., the actor), for the person who receives the sacrifice (i.e., the recipient), and for the relationship. We conclude by discussing important directions for future research on the implications of sacrifice for the well‐being of individuals and their relationships.     

Is the moral domain unique? A social influence perspective for the study of moral cognition

The nature of the cognitive processes that give rise to moral judgment and behavior has been a central question of psychology for decades. In this paper, we suggest that an often ignored yet fruitful stream of research for informing current debates on the nature of moral cognition is social influence. We introduce what we call the “social‐moderation‐of‐process” perspective, a methodological framework for leveraging insights from social influence research to inform debates in moral psychology over the mechanisms underlying moral cognition and the moral domains in which those mechanisms operate. We demonstrate the utility of the social‐moderation‐of‐process perspective by providing a detailed example of how research on social influence in behavioral ethics can be utilized to test a research question related to a debate between two prominent theories in moral psychology. We then detail how researchers across the field of moral psychology can utilize our social‐moderation‐of‐process perspective.     

Adults’ implicit associations to infant positive and negative acoustic cues: Moderation by empathy and gender

In this study a novel auditory version of the Single Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT-A) was developed to investigate (a) the valence of adults’ associations to infant cries and laughs, (b) moderation of implicit associations by gender and empathy, and (c) the robustness of implicit associations controlling for auditory sensitivity. Eighty adults (50% females) were administered two SC-IAT-As, the Empathy Quotient, and the Weinstein Noise Sensitivity Scale. Adults showed positive implicit associations to infant laugh and negative ones to infant cry; only the implicit associations with the infant laugh were negatively related to empathy scores, and no gender differences were observed. Finally, implicit associations to infant cry were affected by noise sensitivity. The SC-IAT-A is useful to evaluate the valence of implicit reactions to infant auditory cues and could provide fresh insights into understanding processes that regulate the quality of adult–infant relationships.     

Blind ethics: Closing one's eyes polarizes moral judgments and discourages dishonest behavior

Four experiments demonstrate that closing one’s eyes affects ethical judgment and behavior because it induces people to mentally simulate events more extensively. People who considered situations with their eyes closed rather than open judged immoral behaviors as more unethical and moral behaviors as more ethical. In addition, considering potential decisions with closed eyes decreased stated intentions to behave ethically and actual self-interested behavior. This relationship was mediated by the more extensive mental simulation that occurred with eyes closed rather than open, which, in turn, intensified emotional reactions to the ethical situation. We discuss the implications of these findings for moral psychology and ethical decision making.     

Keeping the illusion of control under control: Ceilings, floors, and imperfect calibration

Prior research has claimed that people exaggerate probabilities of success by overestimating personal control in situations that are heavily or completely chance-determined. We examine whether such overestimation of control persists in situations where people do have control. Our results suggest a simple model that accounts for prior findings on illusory control as well as for situations where actual control is high: People make imperfect estimates of their level of control. By focusing on situations marked by low control, prior research has created the illusion that people generally overestimate their level of control. Across three studies, we show that when they have a great deal of control, people under-estimate it. Implications for research on perceived control and co-variation assessment are discussed.